|
Silly Hats
She was looking silly to the nth degree. Which, to a mathematician, was a huge turn on.
He sat there at the window working out what, exactly, silly to the nth degree would look like. Or, rather, how he would represent it, because actual looks were far too concrete for him, being a mathematician.
He even had an ugly tie, which further emphasised his complete lack of anything to do with the concrete and tangible. A matching ugly tie clip held a pair of glasses which he didn't actually need, which was, in a way, a statement in and of itself. The glasses had a stretch of masking tape across one of the lenses, which made it a bit of a blessing that he didn't wear them, as he'd soon have troubles seeing, if he didn't already. The stretch of masking tape had the words "Blitter eat fein" on them, with no pun intended, he often told people who asked. It was a very mathematical sort of thing to say.
He took another sip of his coffee, black, with one and a half teaspoons of sugar. He had had a tiny argument with the waitress about the terminology, suggesting that perhaps it was tablespoons instead of teaspoons she meant, but was forced, after much heated discussion around the café, to concede that she might be right about the teaspoon nomenclature. He said, at the end of the exchange, and to desperately try to dispel some of the looks he was getting from fellow café patrons, that maybe he'd have one and 176/250ths teaspoons of sugar in that coffee, then. In the end, he got tea. Which he was going to complain about, but there was a large man in a red checked flannel shirt at the counter talking with the waitress, so he didn't. He just persisted in calling the cup of stuff before him coffee to save face.
He caught the slightest glimpse of his own hair in the reflection of the window when he looked up from his coffee. It was tousled, and not tousled immaculately, as seemed to be the fashion these days. It was genuinely tangled and twisted above his head in a manner that suggested that he wasn't going to get it untangled anytime soon, and any attempts to do so, even with the aid of a set of shears and some good liquor, was far more trouble than it was worth. Generally, it was covered over by his own silly hat, not nearly so silly as the woman was wearing, but silly in its' own sort of silly brown and cream knit with a thing on top that wasn't a pom-pom, but it was remarkably similar.
His face made a slightly greasy thunk noise against the window as he pressed forward to look at the woman, disappearing around the corner in a flurry of pink fur and that ridiculous hat.
He sipped a little more of his coffee, sagely, he thought, like a professor would do.
And he smiled, softly, to himself, contentedly, like he knew a secret no one else in the café knew-- It was a tablespoon she'd put the sugar into the coffee with, or would have, had she served him coffee in the end.
However, there was one little secret he'd forgotten, himself-- he wasn't a mathematician at all.
disclaimer:
We are in California this week!
Woo!
Okay, okay, calm down, calm down.
So, California.
"Why," you might ask.
"Because," we say. "Even though we've got a tried and true East Coaster and some other guy that prefers his weather wet, cold, and just outside the FAI's offices in Merrion Square, we're going to, you know, scope it out. Take a quick decco, as it were." And we don't need to speak in quotes, because it's our column. Damnit.
Yeah, so, cool, huh?
But I tell you what, you'd be surprised, but there is a shocking lack of Clare girls in bikinis out this way. Which is a damn, damn shame. Next time we'll have to bring our own, I suppose.
|
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.